Why I switched from the Samsung Galaxy S3 to the Galaxy Nexus

In July, I was looking for a new android phone. My HTC Desire Z was feeling
pretty slow and after seeing how well Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) performed on my
friend’s devices, I decided to upgrade.

I’ve read a few reviews back then and it seemed like the Samsung Galaxy S3 was
the best phone at the time: Its hardware is stunning, it’s faster than every
other phone and it looks okay. I checked that you can root it, install custom
ROMs and that CyanogenMod is available. After using it for a few months, I have
come to the conclusion that I don’t want to keep it.

Stock Samsung firmware

Samsung ships their devices with their own version of Android, with a GUI on
top called TouchWiz. I dislike all vendor-specific versions of Android because
they often look bad, perform bad, make apps look bad due to strange theming
and because they just destroy the polished and nice feel which android has
since version 4. Also, if I ever want to switch to a different device, I need
to use a different UI anyways, so investing time and data into the specific
version of some vendor doesn’t make any sense to me.

Furthermore, these vendor-specific versions often lag behind the official
Android version and I can’t stand that. I want the latest and greatest Android
version as soon as it’s available (e.g. Jelly Bean).

CyanogenMod 10 quality

Therefore, the logical conclusion is to use a nice custom ROM. In my
experience, CyanogenMod fits the bill. Other ROMs feel very amateurish and I
dislike that on a phone.

Of course, since CyanogenMod 10 (CM10) is still experimental, I know what to
expect. However, it seems that the Galaxy S3 CM10 developers (codeworkx,
xplodwild, …) have a very hard time working on that device because of what
Samsung releases: large code drops after each official release, without proper
git history. There is a (german)
interview with codeworkx where he explains this in a bit more detail, and
also an
(english) forum post at xda-developers.

In my experience, I had problems with mobile connectivity (you need to enter
airplane mode and leave it again sometimes), the camera (wouldn’t work at all),
a memory leak (device needed to be restarted once a day) and taking calls
(sometimes the other side wouldn’t hear you).

xda-developers and the way you obtain ROMs

The way most developers publish their ROM is quite horrible: In the android
forum xda-developers, they start a thread and post their ROM there. In the case
of CM10, the first post is not updated regularly, so you have to read all the
posts if you want to stay up to date. We are talking about hundreds of pages
with 100 posts per page — and those posts are horrible. People don’t read and
ask the same questions over and over again. They are unfriendly to each other
and spread half knowledge about things which they don’t understand.

After reading lots of low-quality posts you still don’t know what has been
changed between each ROM version that is available (nightlies or experimental
builds, usually a new one each day). While there is the git changelog, normal
users (and even experienced developers) don’t understand what’s going on by
reading that. Developers apparently don’t care about producing a small
changelog for each build. Neither do they usually track issues publicly in a
bug tracker, which makes reporting issues (and fixing them, I suppose) very
frustrating for every party involved.

All in all, this is the most horrible way I can imagine to distribute software.

The Galaxy S3 itself

There are many little points which make the Galaxy S3 not as nice to use as
other phones:

The home button does not feel comfortable to use.

The display is pretty big and sometimes it’s hard to reach some areas.

It takes a long time for the device to wake up when locked.I suppose this
is due to some deep sleep mode.

I’m not the only one who thinks that way, see for example codeworkx,
who agrees with me ;-).

The Galaxy Nexus

I don’t think I need to lose many words about the Galaxy Nexus. Since it’s a
Nexus device, I got it with 4.0 and received the over-the-air upgrade a few
minutes later. Every feature I’ve tried so far works just fine. I don’t have to
read some strange forum with strange people. I don’t have to flash new software
versions all the time and hope that people can still call me and my phone still
works.

While the hardware is obviously not as great as the S3’s, I’ve learned that I
prefer a polished Android experience (the way it was meant to be used) over
bleeding edge hardware by far. For the foreseeable future, I intend to buy only
Nexus devices.